Ephemeral Wayfinding

In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.

— Andy Warhol, 1968

The true luxury today is 15 minutes of anonymity.

— Sophie Fontanel, 2010Facebook became the largest organism in the history of life on earth by giving us an easy way to connect to almost everyone. But then we suffered from Context Collapse and Information Overload. Enter Snapchat. To some Shapchat is a lot about sexting, but to scholars like danah boyd its about attention and specialness.

Against a sea of people endlessly index-finger swiping through infinite scrolls of Twitter or Instagram or Facebook news feeds, when someone receives a Snapchat they often save it for a private moment when they can give it better attention.

It’s hard to argue that Compass H2O is a better map than a Google Map on a cell phone, but it could be a more special map. If you watch that Google Glass Social Compass video that Sharon found again, their use case is pretty thin. It’s US$6,000 in hardware so 4 friends can find the gorilla exhibit at the zoo! They aren’t really selling powerful functionality in that video, instead they’re selling human connection. Attention. Specialness.